Published on 12, July, 2020
I was wondering today if this is an autistic thing.
I've spent several decades collecting objects and the last decade+ trying to rid myself of the majority.
However, I have given up on the idea of ever being minimalist.
I notice that I remember where everything came from, even, when purchased, which shop in which town.
I try not to be sentimental about things, but sometimes I can't help it.
My mother, who I believe was autistic, was a hoarder in quite an extreme sense.
My autistic friend finds it very hard to part with belongings.
Everything has an association.
Are others like this and are there contributors here who are genuinely minimalistic and don't have an attachment to things?
There is also probably a generational thing at work here.
I wasn't brought up in this throwaway society where objects are cheap (but not food and fuel!).
My parents lived through WW2 and were of the 'make do and mend' generation.
They were on rations during the War and my mother often spoke of it.
After the War things were kept as 'they might come in handy one day' and I've obviously imbibed some of this.
I absolutely agree. Growing up, our family kept the same stuff, only rarely buying "new" things.
When I remember the "bin collection" in the 1970's (quantity wise = 1 bin bag per week) compared to now (I suppose x2 or x3 bags)....it is horrific! How the hell did we let it become like this Chuck-away-Charlie free-for-all.
Number said:How the hell did we let it become like this Chuck-away-Charlie free-for-all.
There is a massive change between how life was as we were growing up - me in the 1960s/70s, my husband in the 1950s/60s.
It is quite extraordinary this business with clothes.
My mum made ours as we were poor and we wouldn't dream of just getting rid of them because they weren't fashionable.
Actually, they never were fashionable.
Goods were expensive and valued and nowadays they are cheap and not valued.
I agree, I find it totally unacceptable and refuse to participate myself. Though my husband has one (second hand) so if there is something like that then it is possible. But I still protest and will complain to whatever company if it is possible to find out how... but so many of them are now so hard to contact, and my executive functioning is poor.
I think they do recycle them to some level to at least extract the valuable minerals in them.
then accidentally corrupted or lost when a hard drive crashes or the "google / apple cloud" account ran out of space and the phone dies :)
same.
what's annoying is a lot of this change appears to be forced on us to some degree by making life more difficult without, say a smartphone, etc. "oh you need to use our app for this or that". Oh ok. "oh and our app needs a compatible phone". Oh ok. "which means getting a new device every few years as we don't support these old ones". We're only just getting started with this. What do they do with all these "old" phones when they go for recycling? Do they actually reuse any of the parts? It's not even like when you could unsolder and reuse chips, these are systems on a chip with ball grid array solder pads making replacement of or removal of parts virtually impossible.
Snowman said:They never see the software on the user side so no way of running it on yor own server etc. It's a weird, throw away time indeed
Then there is photography.
How many photos are never printed, never put into albums, never passed down in families ...never looked at again ...
valued and repairable. i was a child in the 80s and 90s but I can remember patches on clothes.
i was never into clothes as fashion, and we used to wear things until they were properly worn through.
A lot of the rubbish is packaging now too. We used to go to the local butchers and meat would be in paper or thin plastic wrap, green grocers used to sell fruit by weight again in brown paper bags but we used to have meals that were cooked from scratch. the idea of bunging something in a plastic tray in a microwave for 5 minutes was completely unheard of.
Even for things like televisions, radios etc there used to be a repair man who'd come round to the house and fix things or a shop in town you could take them to. We had a colour TV from the 1970s I was still using right into the late 2000s, the recycle centre (tip) is full of gadgets that don't "work" any more because they've been obsoleted or the internal battery has stopped holding charge etc.
What's happening to all these smartphones that were cutting edge back in 2015 and can't even run apps from the app store any more?
The modern computer consoles too, they're not even going to be of value for "retro" owners as so many of the games now rely on servers on the Internet to function. I still play the games I had in the 80s, no problems. My kids won't be able to play Fortnite in another 30 years, looking back on it like I might with games from my computer as they're downloads and most of the logic / matchmaking / maps etc live on cloud servers which will be switched off eventually. They never see the software on the user side so no way of running it on yor own server etc. It's a weird, throw away time indeed.
Agreed. It can't go on this way? I try not to "join in" with the "if-you-fancy-it-just-buy-it" attitude. I think I do better than most!